His radio was bringing him words, but they meant nothing to him. His only comfort lay in the fact that men knew he was here in the air, and that probably they were making some preparation for his landing.
It seemed to him that now a glimmer of flares burned brighter in a certain spot. He hoped these marked a landing field, hoped also that radio landing beacons would be here to respond to the visual radio receiver on his instrument board.
Down he came in long sweeping circles, seeking a place to land. A wrong landing could mean death, not only to him, but to hapless ones he might crash upon down there on the fog-blanketed earth. For dreadful sickening seconds, apprehension rode him. His heart seemed clutched in iron fingers, his face was white under the strain as his eyes watched the instrument board.
Ah! they were quivering—those two strange little reeds that by their vibration told the good news of radio beacons waiting down there to help him make his landing. With a joyous surge of relief in his heart, Hal Dane began his long, slanting, final downward plunge. An over-quivering of the left reed told him that he was diverging too much on that side. With a quick swerve of the airplane, he put both reeds back into a balancing quiver, and thus followed their direction straight down the path of the beacon to a landing.
He had landed! He was in Japan!
The young flyer had been so engrossed in blind flying to a perfect landing by instruments alone, that it came as a shock to him to look out of his machine’s window and see the huge crowd that awaited him on this Oriental landing field. The throng had scattered somewhat to make room for the ship’s downward plunge.
Hal Dane thrust a blond head out of the window. “I’m Hal Dane,” he said simply, “in the Wind Bird. We—we made it, I reckon.”
At that, the crowd swept in. They had no more idea of what he was saying than he had had of their “Tokio Asahi” that had been radioed up to him. But the boy’s smile and his quietness of manner had won them.
Radios had been busy for two days in Japan, as well as in other parts of the world. From the time Hal Dane had left America, radio had winged its messages back and forth to various parts of the civilized universe.
The phenomenal courage of a boy alone flying the greatest ocean, had stirred the heart of Japan. And now that Hal Dane, Viking of the Sky, had made his landing, Japan set him high on her throng’s shoulders.